Of Idi Amin Deniers, KCCA city clean-up and unnecessary taxi parks

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WHAT’S UP!

It is largely accepted that Adolf Hitler was a monster, and the Nazis concept of racial superiority led to some of the worst crimes in human history. The worst of them was, of course, the attempted extermination of the Jewish people, but they also tried to do away with those they took as inferior, including Africans. So, why would someone turn around and claim all this is a hoax and that the Nazis were very good folks?

David Irving was a respectable English historian, for a time. But sometime in the 1980s, he started embracing radical ideology that held that the Nazi death camps, the gas chambers and the Holocaust did not happen.

For his pains, Irving was convicted in Germany and Austria under laws against Holocaust denial and “trivialising” Nazi crimes, jailed in Austria and barred from multiple countries, including Germany, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other similar deniers have also been punished for trying to rewrite history.

What does that have to do with Uganda? Last week on Monday, Ugandans celebrated the life and death of Archbishop Janan Luwum, who was murdered by Idi Amin on January 16, 1977. An accident scene was then staged, and Amin claimed the Bishop, together with cabinet minister Charles Oboth Ofumbi and police chief Erinayo Oryema, had tried to overpower the driver and died in the subsequent crash. But eyewitness reports and investigations revealed that the Archbishop had multiple gunshot wounds and had been severely assaulted before his death.

The Archbishop’s ‘crime’ was being a vocal critic of Amin’s brutal regime, speaking out against human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings. He, in fact, delivered a note of protest to the Amin government.

Anglicans do not create saints like the Catholics do, but Luwum is considered a martyr, and his statue is among the Twentieth Century Martyrs on the front of Westminster Abbey in London, UK.

Just as Ugandans were celebrating the man who had stood up against a dictator and paid for it with his life, the son of the said dictator went on the Internet and denied it ever happened. Hussein Amin claimed that Luwum was in fact a rebel, that Idi Amin did not kill the Archbishop, and that the then accident was the cause of his death.

Hussein has been on the record several times denying that his father ever killed anybody, and that all the reports of atrocities were just a media campaign to spoil his father’s reputation.

It is a sick irony that Hussein’s mother, Kay Amin, was herself brutally murdered and her body mutilated by Amin.

Just like Irving, Hussein should be punished by trying to rewrite history. It is an insult to the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who died during Amin’s reign, not just Luwum.

Just like in Europe, there should be a law in Uganda against denying the atrocities of the Amin regime. Surely one of those overpaid, but largely incompetent Members of Parliament can introduce a Bill to do that. That MP from Tororo who is obsessed with drinking hours can go out with a bang (she lost her seat, so she is definitely going out) if she does that. And of course, all the people who consider Archbishop Luwum a saint will thank her, and she will forever be remembered.

The KCCA City clean-up

 What is one to make of the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA)’s actions over the last week? After directing vendors on Kampala streets to relocate to markets, KCCA enforcement officials, together with the Police and military, forcefully evicted them. The public woke up on Saturday morning with relatively clear streets.

There have been several efforts in the past to evict vendors from Kampala streets, but somehow they have always found their way back.

In fact, some vendors interviewed by the media swore that within two weeks they would be back. We shall just have to wait and see.

Reports have it that next KCCA is set to remove ‘illegal’ taxis and bodaboda stages, in further efforts to de-clutter the city streets. Predictably, the taxi guys are not very happy with this. They claim that the present taxi parks are too small to accommodate all the taxis plying the city streets.

Bodabodas are another matter, but Kampala does not need taxi parks in the city; that is where much of the transport chaos comes from. There was a lot of fanfare when the Natete Taxi Park was opened several years ago, with the promise that there would be no more ‘waiting’ for passengers along the city streets.

Therein is the problem with Uganda’s transport system, where taxis (and the few buses that still ply the streets) wait for up to 30 minutes for passengers to fill it. It should just be a ‘pick and drop’ system, like it happens in other, more efficient cities. It has been calculated that the economy loses billions of shillings every day, with people stuck in taxis waiting to get from one place to another, but doing nothing.

Of course, the best time to implement otherwise unpopular but necessary reforms is just after elections, and KCCA seems to have got its timing right.

Will it work this time? Or will the vendors return after two weeks as they threaten to do? Will the taxis finally shape up, or gleefully go about their chaotic business like they have been doing?

We wait with bated breath.

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